Town & Country Salutes the Town & Countrys of America

This week: Sex, Drugs and Town & Country.

Mike Saunders, in the November 12, 1970, issue of Rolling Stone, approvingly described Humble Pie's first album, As Safe as Yesterday, as "noisy, unmelodic, heavy metal-leaden shit rock." A portion of that phrase (which had also featured less imaginatively in Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild") would come to denote an entire noisy, unmelodic sub-genre. In the same review, he called the band's second album, Town and Country, "quiet and basically acoustic…and boring." The album was released in England only, with no promotional campaign, on Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate imprint, which folded shortly thereafter. Town and Country flopped. (The album was recently reissued on CD.) Humble Pie doubled down on the heavy metal-leaden shit rock, never again to gamble on quiet and acoustic.

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That mantle was picked up by Town and Country, a Chicago-based drone quartet which uses no amplification, computers, "or electronics of any kind." Its members discovered a shared interest in John Cale, Japanese Gagaku court music, and the Environment LPs of Syntonic Research, and like so many before them, decided to form a band. The group's basic toolkit of cornet, harmonium, bass clarinet, and hand bells eventually grew to include guimbri, tampura, drarp, autoharp, karkabas, kalimba, and shakuhachi. It's "Music to Smoke Cloves By," Pitchfork says. Town and Country recorded its swan song in 2006, re-forming as DRMWPN (pronouced "dream weapon"). At this writing, Town & Country magazine has no plans to follow suit.

Town & Country, "the blue state country music project" of Rob Shapiro and Brian Woodbury, released their first album in 2011. Their songbook covers unfamiliar country & western terrain like diversity and gay marriage with a tip of the ten gallon hat. Shapiro's agreeable croon will be familiar to listeners of James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood on audiobook, which Shapiro narrated. Woodbury, the band's songwriter, also dabbles in musical theater. His original works include Ghost-s, which follows a small town theater troupe as they attempt to stage a musical version of Ghost, the popular Patrick Swayze film, having unwittingly secured the rights for Ghosts, the 19th century morality play by Henrik Ibsen; and Space Opera, about an extremist religious colony on Mars. By the sound of it, ideal material for the Town and Country Players of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

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